By Ken Jennings, the host of “Jeopardy!” – in the NYT (thanks to Marilyn W.)
When I first stepped behind the host lectern on the quiz show “Jeopardy!,” I was intimidated for two reasons. Most obviously, I had the hopeless task of filling the very large shoes of Alex Trebek, the legendary broadcaster and pitch-perfect host who’d been synonymous with the show since 1984.
But I was also keenly aware that the show was one of TV’s great institutions, almost a public trust. Since I was 10 years old, I’d watched Alex Trebek carve out a safe space for people to know things, where viewers get a steady diet of 61 accurate (and hopefully even interesting) facts every game. And I wondered: Even if “Jeopardy!” could survive the loss in 2020 of its peerless host, could it survive the conspiracy theories and fake news of our post-fact era?
Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century, remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago. But societies are built on facts, as we can see more clearly when institutions built on knowledge teeter. Inaccurate facts make for less informed decisions. Less informed decisions make for bad policy. Garbage in, garbage out.
I’ve always hated the fact that “trivia,” really our only word in English for general-knowledge facts and games, is the same word we use to mean “things of no importance.” So unfair! Etymologically, the word is linked to the trivium of medieval universities, the three fundamental courses of grammar, rhetoric and logic. And much of today’s so-called trivia still deals with subjects that are fundamentally academic.
Watch a game of “Jeopardy!” tonight or head down to your local pub quiz, and you’re sure to be asked about scientific breakthroughs, milestones of history and masterpieces of art. Trivia, maybe — but far from trivial.
There might also be questions about pop lyrics and sports statistics, but even those are markers of cultural literacy, the kind of shared knowledge that used to tie society together: the proposition that factual questions could be answered correctly or not, that those answers matter and that we largely agreed on the authorities and experts who could confirm them.
But trust in authority is not exactly at an all-time high, as you’ve probably heard. It’s been more than eight years since Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of the phrase “alternative facts” on “Meet the Press,” an Orwellian way to soft-pedal the outright falsehoods being told by powerful institutions. You don’t hear much about alternative facts anymore, but only because so many of them are no longer the alternative to anything. They have moved to the mainstream.
Scientific consensus in fields like climate change and vaccine efficacy is no longer the official position of American government. Ditto for legal facts (birthright citizenship), political facts (the winner of the 2020 election) and historical facts (too many examples to list). Inconvenient experts who push back can be removed by executive order; inconvenient books that disagree can be removed from libraries. (continued on www.skyline725.com)